CM Nitish Kumar to implement more stringent liquor law

Nitish Kumar

BIHAR

Just a day after Patna High Court struck down the state's Prohibition of Liquor Act which banned the consumption of Indian Made Foreign Liquor, chief minister Nitish Kumar said that he would notify an even more stringent Prohibition and Excise Act on Sunday to keep Bihar dry.

While attending an event to mark Agrasen Jayanti, Nitish Kumar said that they will mark the centenary celebrations of Mahatma Gandhi's Champaran Satyagraha movement by implementing the new Act on Gandhi Jayanti.

According to this new Act all adults are culpable in case a liquor-related offence is committed in a house and imposition of community penalty in case of repeated offence of manufacturing liquor or trading in a village.

Legal experts think that even this new Act would stand the scrutiny of law precisely because many provisions of the previous Act have been carried forward in the new Act. Counsel Y V Giri, who argued in the HC on behalf of liquor manufacturers who had challenged the previous Act said that the state government should better pore over the HC order before notifying the new Act. In His opinion, it too would be quashed if it is challenged.

Old provisions that would find place in the new law are penalising someone for allowing use of premises for a liquor-related offence, penalising a company and everyone in charge of its affairs if the offender is a company, and fining the owner of a house from where utensils meant for making liquor are found.

Nitish Kumar also said that liquor consumption is a social stigma and prohibition would improve society. He further added that all previous excise laws, including the one quashed by the high court on Friday, would be repealed with the enforcement of the new Act.

People should go and see the post-prohibition peaceful environment in villages which earlier used to present a picture of chaos, especially in the evenings, he said.

He further said that women would then become victim of domestic violence. The poor used to spend almost three-fourth of their daily wages on liquor. Prohibition is saving people's thousands of crores as they are not wasting it on alcohol. These savings will boost the economy of the state in the long run as people would invest it in businesses.